We had to kill our patients

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she 'prayed for God to have mercy on her soul' after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William 'Forest' McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

Euthanasia is illegal in Louisiana, and The Mail on Sunday is protecting the identities of the medical staff concerned to prevent them being made scapegoats for the events of last week.

Their families believe their confessions are an indictment of the appalling failure of American authorities to help those in desperate need after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, claiming thousands of lives and making 500,000 homeless.

'These people were going to die anyway'

The doctor said: "I didn't know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

"I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul."

The doctor, who finally fled her hospital late last week in fear of being murdered by the armed looters, said: "This was not murder, this was compassion. They would have been dead within hours, if not days. We did not put people down. What we did was give comfort to the end.

"I had cancer patients who were in agony. In some cases the drugs may have speeded up the death process.

"We divided patients into three categories: those who were traumatised but medically fit enough to survive, those who needed urgent care, and the dying.

"People would find it impossible to understand the situation. I had to make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

"It came down to giving people the basic human right to die with dignity.

"There were patients with Do Not Resuscitate signs. Under normal circumstances, some could have lasted several days. But when the power went out, we had nothing.

"Some of the very sick became distressed. We tried to make them as comfortable as possible.

"The pharmacy was under lockdown because gangs of armed looters were roaming around looking for their fix. You have to understand these people were going to die anyway."

Mr McQueen, a utility manager for the town of Abita Springs, half an hour north of New Orleans, told relatives that patients had been 'put down', saying: "They injected them, but nurses stayed with them until they died."

Mr McQueen has been working closely with emergency teams and added: "They had to make unbearable decisions."

The Modern Hippocratic Oath seems to give them the narrowest of margin for such drastic measure without violating their sworn integrity. "I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God." Surely no rational, compassionate group will seek to make this an issue, though I'm both leery and weary of professional finger-pointers, be they cloaked in political or religious garb.

Rough call for the doctors. I hope that no one sees this as an issue to pursue and prosecute. Sounds like they did the right thing.

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I share your viewpoint, but what is troubling is the fact that it never seems to be too challenging locating some overzealous prosecutor lurking in the woods, willing to make a huge issue out of events that do not warrant an aggressive response. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

I'm surprised people aren't more upset, the nation as a whole is still not comprehending the extent of what has happened, it seems.

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From the people I've been talking to, most of them don't want to think about it.

But this kinda reminds me of the evolution debate. They don't want you to teach evolution, but it's on the NCLB test. To quote Cavey Jr. "they screw you coming and going". Bush and the neocons wouldn't dare make a comment about this. People are already blaming them for the disaster's aftermath in the first place. If they started in on doctors having to make tough decisions like this because of their perceived incompetence... I don't think that would go over very well.

I believe that euthanasia should be legalized.
With a checks and balance system to the ultimate decision.
In this case, I don't judge the doctor one bit. It's almost like a battlefield triage. Had to make a call.

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